Abstract
Psychologists are increasingly interested in the topic of eudaimonia, a term adopted from ancient Greek philosophers (with most modern views traceable to Aristotle), referring to human flourishing. Conceptual confusion remains because investigators generally have not clarified how and why they have appropriated Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia. This chapter presents a close interpretation of Aristotle’s view and explores continuities and discontinuities in psychologists’ application of this original concept to provide a theoretical baseline and increase conceptual clarity. Eudaimonia is explored as an ethical concept referring to the best kind of life, which is an outgrowth of humans’ natural endowments. Eudaimonia is a form of activity (that includes subjective experience, but is not limited to it), comprised by the pursuit of ends that are choiceworthy for human beings. Eudaimonia is a unified way of life, but it has multiple constituents (e.g., belonging, justice, and social harmony). Eudaimonia is related to, but distinct from pleasure (hedonia). Human flourishing is a matter of a complete life that encompasses virtue or excellence, and Aristotle saw it as the ultimate aim of human life. The chapter concludes with several major challenges for eudaimonia researchers.
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Notes
- 1.
To avoid repetitive date referencing, all citations of Aristotle (1999) will be to the NE (Nicomachean Ethics).
- 2.
It is important to note and disassociate myself from Aristotle’s notoriously inegalitarian views. In accordance with his time, he viewed propertied male citizens as superior humans, with outsiders, women and slaves having a lesser status. In every modern appropriation of his ethics, including this one, these inegalitarian views are repudiated. His ethics can be relatively easily universalized to all human beings to square with contemporary views.
- 3.
In part of Book X of the NE, Aristotle discusses contemplation as the highest human activity. There is a good deal of controversy regarding how this concept is to be integrated into the rest of Aristotle’s account of eudaimonia. I have downplayed this concept and the controversy in this chapter because it does not seem pertinent enough to psychological scholarship to merit recounting it. For more on this question, see Broadie (1991).
- 4.
Aristotle described three types of friendship: utility, pleasure, and character. A utility friendship, in which a friend is an instrument to one’s end. He saw character friendship as a central human good because character friends seek ends that are good in themselves together and want one another to flourish (Fowers, 2005).
- 5.
Waterman et al. (2010) presented some evidence that these six categories can be summarized in a single dimension, but this evidence is based on an inappropriate use of confirmatory factor analytic methods.
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Fowers, B.J. (2016). Aristotle on Eudaimonia: On the Virtue of Returning to the Source. In: Vittersø, J. (eds) Handbook of Eudaimonic Well-Being. International Handbooks of Quality-of-Life. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42445-3_4
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